Installing Guitar Pro on Linux

July 24, 2016

In my specific case, I used Ubuntu 14.04 and Guitar Pro 6.1.9 (r11686).

First, you’ll need to download the Guitar Pro 6 deb file by logging into the Guitar Pro website.

Next, drop into the terminal to extract the deb into a temp directory, gp6-tmp -

% dpkg-deb -x ~/Downloads/gp6-full-linux-r11686.deb gp6-tmp

Now you’ll need to extract the control information -

% dpkg-deb --control ~/Downloads/gp6-full-linux-r11686.deb gp6-tmp/DEBIAN

For whatever reason, there are a couple of Mac DS_Store files laying around in the archive, so let’s remove those -

% rm gp6-tmp/.DS_Store gp6-tmp/._.DS_Store

Now, open up the file gp6-tmp/DEBIAN/control in a text editor and find the Depends line. According to this wiki post, we need to remove gksu from the dependencies.

(Note: I’m not sure that you actually need to do this since we end up needing to install gksu anyway to launch the updater.)

% grep '^Depends' gp6-tmp/DEBIAN/control
Depends: gksu, libasound2, libc6 (>= 2.1.3), libglu1-mesa, libportaudio0, libportaudio2, libssl0.9.8, libstdc++6, libxml2, libxslt1.1, zlib1g

% vim gp6-tmp/DEBIAN/control # Make your edits to remove gksu

% grep '^Depends' gp6-tmp/DEBIAN/control
Depends: libasound2, libc6 (>= 2.1.3), libglu1-mesa, libportaudio0, libportaudio2, libssl0.9.8, libstdc++6, libxml2, libxslt1.1, zlib1g

Now we can build our modified deb and install it -

% dpkg -b gp6-tmp gp6-modified.deb
dpkg-deb: building package `guitarpro6' in `gp6-modified.deb'.

% sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture gp6-modified.deb

Note that you will probably receive the following errors -

dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of guitarpro6:
 guitarpro6 depends on libglu1-mesa.
 guitarpro6 depends on libportaudio0.
 guitarpro6 depends on libportaudio2; however:
  Package libportaudio2:i386 is not installed.
 guitarpro6 depends on libssl0.9.8; however:

dpkg: error processing package guitarpro6 (--install):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.10.1-0ubuntu2) ...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.22-1ubuntu1) ...
Processing triggers for bamfdaemon (0.5.1+14.04.20140409-0ubuntu1) ...
Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf-2.index...
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.54ubuntu1.1) ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
 guitarpro6

The following will have apt-get fix the broken package -

% sudo apt-get install -f

From here I was able to launch Guitar Pro just fine. If you have problems launching, you can find the launcher script in /opt/GuitarPro6/launcher.sh

But there’s still one more problem - sound doesn’t seem to work! I’m not sure how to get MIDI output configured, but using the RSE works just fine, you just need to update Guitar Pro. In order to do that, we need to install gksu (which is why I question whether or not we actually needed to remove it from the deps in the first place) -

% sudo apt-get install gksu

If we don’t, we’ll get the following error when attempting to update -

Failed to start Guitar Pro Updater

Once you have gksu installed, open Guitar Pro and choose Help > Launch Updater to update and install the RSE sound banks. Once that completes, restart Guitar Pro and audio playback should work.